I have baked baguettes a few times, the recipe I used was something from the net which might or might not be good. It went like this:
- 13 dl wheat flour
- 5 dl clean, cold water
- salt, some olive oil
Mix, knead, allow the bread to rise to double size in a cool environment. Bake at 275 C.
Now, the first time I made this, I was surprised how well it went. Pretty decent crust, hard but not burnt, easily done and so forth. I noticed however that after a short while the crust was soft. I stored it in plastic bags.
The second time I did it, which to me was very consistent with my first attempt, the crust was soft from the beginning, even though the bread was approaching a color of brown almost burnt.
What techniques should I know of that can improve the crust? Store bread in paper bags would probably help the crust stay hard, but is there anything else? Am I doing anything completely wrong?
I tried to search the site but I find it is not entirely easy to find what you are looking for.
[bread] [crust]
(tags bread and crust) produced this existing question, which while it asks about the color of the bread, has applicable answers: cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1535/… – justkt Dec 9 '10 at 22:02